We must mourn all victims. But until we look honestly at the violence we export, nothing will ever change

More strikingly, where were the heads of state when the Western-backed, Saudi-led coalition bombed a Yemeni wedding on September 28, killing 131 civilians, including 80 women? That massacre didn’t go viral, and Obama and Hollande did not apologize, yet alone barely even acknowledge the tragedy.

Do French lives matter more than Lebanese, Turkish, Kurdish, and Yemeni ones? Were these not, too, “heinous, evil, vile acts”?

Western countries, particularly the U.S., are directly responsible for the violence and destruction in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Yemen, from which millions of refugees are fleeing:

The illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq led to the deaths of at least one million people, destabilized the entire region, and created extreme conditions in which militant groups like al-Qaeda spread like wildfire, eventually leading to the emergence of ISIS.

In Afghanistan, the ongoing U.S. war and occupation — which the Obama administration just prolonged for a second time — has led to approximately a quarter of a million deaths and has displaced millions of Afghans.

The disastrous U.S.-led NATO intervention in Libya destroyed the government, turning the country into a hotbed for extremism and allowing militant groups like ISIS to spread west into North Africa. Thousands of Libyans have been killed, and hundreds of thousands made refugees.

In Yemen, the U.S. and other Western nations are arming and backing the Saudi-led coalition that is raining down bombs, including banned cluster munitions, on civilian areas, pulverizing the poorest country in the Middle East. And, once again — the story should now be familiar — thousands have been killed and hundreds of thousands have been displaced.

First, you make obviously false statements. Then, you say pointing out your obviously false statements puts me in the other "camp". Frankly, you can't possibly be that stupid, so the only conclusion remains the one you accuse W of: you're a liar. At least W had, according to the CIA director, "every reason to believe" what he said. You have no such excuse.

I don't recall you pointing out any of my "obviously" false statements, and your link is similarly vague. If you think I lied, by all means link to the direct statement and let's go in to detail on it and see who is lying and who is stupid.

Since the late 70s, when Wahabi Youth fought Saudi Arabia for control of Mecca, and it took weeks for the KSA Mercs to stop the armed Wahabis, the Kingdom has been in a bind.

It must support Wahabism as the foundation of the Monarchy's legitimacy. However, extreme Wahabism is a danger itself to the Monarchy, demanding ever more purity.

The solution, blessedly provided 'right on time' by the Soviet Assistance to Afghanistan, saved their bacon. They've depended on giving stipends and salaries to the most radical Wahabis the country produces as a matter of course of the normal functioning of their society - their Education, their Religious Police, the very core Myth of the State.

These men are both the jihadis, the textbook writers, and the teachers at the Madrassah. If they stayed at home instead of going to Syria or Indonesia or Chechnya, they would create trouble.

Perhaps ISIS is just a means to meatgrind the excess Wahabis created by the House of Sauds attempt to maintain legitimacy, and a useful tool of foreign policy.

The CIA intelligence was deemed insufficiently bellicose by Cheney, Feith et. al., so Cheney actually built an independent team of intelligence analysts to create the intelligence to justify Cheney's predetermined conclusions.

At that point the distinction between "lying" and "delusional asshole" became less interesting to me.

You have a pathology. It includes occasionally lying, but to call you a pathological liar would be somewhat imprecise. Pathological trolling, resorting to lying in order to continue the game. I considered the possibility that you were some sort of Turing machine experiment, a machine programmed to keep the exchange going as long as possible. Then I wondered, who would bother programming a machine to elicit defenses of GW Bush? The answers seemed inconsistent with most (but certainly not all) of your other comments.

It was a direct quote, refuting your prior lie. W had "every reason to believe" what he said, according to the Director of the CIA, which approved what he said.

If you are a Turing machine intended to support the Democratic party, then you are horribly misprogrammed. As with Hydrocabron bringing countless threads back to Benghazi, you insist on keeping the focus where Democrats are weakest, actually doing the Republicans' job for them. It is remarkable that of all the things a partisan bot could possibly say to repeat and elicit valid criticism of W and his Iraq policy, you insist on claims that are obviously false and then you invite defense of W and his Iraq policy. If you are a Turing machine programmed to maximize waste of bandwidth, then well done.

I suppose in Bob's world, the President of the United States is supposed to ignore the claims made by the CIA director and listen to some back office analyst?

Bush, Cheney, and Rummy made it very clear what intelligence they wanted. Blair did the same thing. Everyone fell into line or got thrown under the bus. People got fired for not toeing the line and giving the administration exactly what they wanted. There was plenty of warnings the intelligence was bad but these were totally ignored or buried. Not some back office analyst warning. The German government told the administration their primary sources for intelligence to go to war were full of shit well before colin powell spoke at the un. There is no way, no how bush was not aware of this going on. Bush can truthfully say he was given bad intelligence. But he damn well knew it was bad, the chickenhawk trifecta arranged for it to be bad.

You have a pathology. It includes occasionally lying, but to call you a pathological liar would be somewhat imprecise. Pathological trolling, resorting to lying in order to continue the game. I considered the possibility that you were some sort of Turing machine experiment, a machine programmed to keep the exchange going as long as possible. Then I wondered, who would bother programming a machine to elicit defenses of GW Bush? The answers seemed inconsistent with most (but certainly not all) of your other comments.

Sorry, but you need to look in a mirror. It's not a game to me. You are the one who posts purposely vague statements-instead of quoting an individual passage when calling me a liar, posts a link to an longer post-- and instead of actually having a discussion about the issue at hand, tries to act like a pseudo-psychologist.

Further, you can't simply state your position. When I asked if you believe that Bush's defense--the reason you don't consider his statements as lies--is that he and his administration believed the faulty intelligence (that his own intelligence officers have come out and said THEY didn't believe), you deflect and ignore the questions. It is impossible to have even the simplest discussion with you because you obstruct, confuse, and deflect at all turns.

And don't forget, my friend, you started this. You are the one who wanted to argue. Nobody was responding to anything you posted.

Bush, Cheney, and Rummy made it very clear what intelligence they wanted. Blair did the same thing. Everyone fell into line or got thrown under the bus. People got fired for not toeing the line and giving the administration exactly what they wanted. There was plenty of warnings the intelligence was bad but these were totally ignored or buried. Not some back office analyst warning. The German government told the administration their primary sources for intelligence to go to war were full of shit well before colin powell spoke at the un. There is no way, no how bush was not aware of this going on. Bush can truthfully say he was given bad intelligence. But he damn well knew it was bad, the chickenhawk trifecta arranged for it to be bad.

Says the little ISIS voices in your head.

But....but....but the Germans had a source that said something different! Meanwhile our National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) said Saddam had WMD's with 90% certainty.

In recent weeks, I have heard former Associated Press reporter Ron Fournier on Fox News twice asserting, quite offhandedly, that President George W. Bush “lied us into war in Iraq.”

I found this shocking. I took a leave of absence from the bench in 2004-05 to serve as co-chairman of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction—a bipartisan body, sometimes referred to as the Robb-Silberman Commission. It was directed in 2004 to evaluate the intelligence community’s determination that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD—I am, therefore, keenly aware of both the intelligence provided to President Bush and his reliance on that intelligence as his primary casus belli. It is astonishing to see the “Bush lied” allegation evolve from antiwar slogan to journalistic fact.

The intelligence community’s 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) stated, in a formal presentation to President Bush and to Congress, its view that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction—a belief in which the NIE said it held a 90% level of confidence. That is about as certain as the intelligence community gets on any subject.

Recall that the head of the intelligence community, Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet, famously told the president that the proposition that Iraq possessed WMD was “a slam dunk.” Our WMD commission carefully examined the interrelationships between the Bush administration and the intelligence community and found no indication that anyone in the administration sought to pressure the intelligence community into its findings. As our commission reported, presidential daily briefs from the CIA dating back to the Clinton administration were, if anything, more alarmist about Iraq’s WMD than the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate."......

Again, being wrong on the size and scope of Iraq's WMD program is not the same thing as lying.

Being wrong isn't the same thing as lying, you are right. But this is a huge 'mistake', and appears calculated. Being really really wrong, and claiming a country has a capability which it does not, and using that as a pretext to motivate your nation to go to war, that's some highly calculated misinformation. "lying"? No. Manipulative? Oh yes.

Politicians love to be able to hide behind the "intelligence was wrong" shield. Of course we were going to find small amounts of chemical weapons munitions in Iraq. You think 400 rockets was worth going to war over? Highly doubtful those rockets are even up for grabs, on the black market, if we did NOT invade.

Oil, Israel, "payback", and Democracy v.s. WMDs and al-Qa'ida -- let's not pretend, at this hour, we cannot tell which are a sales pitch, and which are true motivations for the conflict.

Being wrong isn't the same thing as lying, you are right. But this is a huge 'mistake', and appears calculated.

Er - no. It doesn't appear to be calculated at all. Our elected leadership (both Democrats and Republicans) made decisions based on the best intelligence available. When the combined National Intelligence Estimate says with 90% confidence that Iraq has WMDs, would you expect our elected leaders to believe otherwise?

"It was just bad intelligence! Everyone was fooled! You can’t say Bush “lied” about Iraq pursuing WMDs or about the Saddam Hussein regime having ties to 9/11 because he was just echoing what the intelligence community said, which was wrong.

This is a line of argumentation that Bush administration officials and Iraq war boosters have been clinging to ever since it became clear that U.S. troops would found no mobile biological weapons labs and no Mutual Admiration Society correspondence between Saddam and Osama. “We were wrong just like everyone else” isn’t a particularly compelling argument, though I suppose that if you’re responsible for one of the modern era’s most significant foreign policy disasters, “shared incompetence” is a more appealing excuse than “willful deception.”

But the Bush administration absolutely did engage in willful deception. Quite a bit of it, in fact. It’s one thing to simply repeat an intelligence assessment that is wrong, and quite another to take a disputed, credibly challenged intelligence assessment and state it as uncontested fact. That’s a lie, and senior Bush officials did it often. There’s no better example of this than the aluminum tubes."

If you were following politics in the six months or so leading up to the actual invasion of Iraq, then you probably remember how much importance senior Bush administration officials put on the fact that Iraq had tried to obtain a certain type of aluminum tube that was, per those same officials, only suitable for use in uranium centrifuges. The tubes were at the heart of their case that Saddam Hussein was pursuing a nuclear weapons program, and had been cited as evidence of Hussein’s intentions by Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and Colin Powell. They even earned a mention in George W. Bush’s now infamous 2003 state of the union address:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.

Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.

The dictator of Iraq is not disarming. To the contrary, he is deceiving.

This was all wrong. And they knew at the time that the intelligence regarding those tubes was nowhere near as strong as they made it out to be. A number of intelligence agencies believed that the tubes were, in fact, made for uranium enrichment. There were, however, a number of dissenting views, including from the State Department and the intelligence arm of the Department of Energy, the agency responsible for maintaining the United States’ nuclear arsenal (i.e. the people who actually know this stuff). DOE determined that the tubes were completely impractical for use in uranium enrichment, and were probably intended for use in conventional rockets. The State Department came to a similar conclusion.

This is a line of argumentation that Bush administration officials and Iraq war boosters have been clinging to ever since it became clear that U.S. troops would found no mobile biological weapons labs and no Mutual Admiration Society correspondence between Saddam and Osama.

No - this is the line all independent investigations including the bi-partisan Robb-Silberman Commission determined. All you got are the hacks at Salon saying different. Couldn't you find a DailyKos link or something from MediaMatters too?

You just want to be a good ISIS monkey claiming America lies to start wars to kill Muslims or something.

What's with all the Bush/Cheney/Wolfowitz/Hadley/Feith revisionism here? Is Patrick's new role as Keyboard Kommando Against Islamofascism inspiring the human trash to crawl back out of from under their rocks? Are wingnuts feeling guilty?

Why shy away from the term "lying"? Powell knew the intelligencs was b.s.

Colin Powell said to his staff during the preparation for his U.N. speech: ""I'm not reading this. This is bullshit."

Fresh evidence emerged last night that Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, was so disturbed about questionable American intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that he assembled a secret team to review the information he was given before he made a crucial speech to the UN security council on February 5.
Mr Powell conducted a full-dress rehearsal of the speech on the eve of the session at his suite in the Waldorf Astoria, his New York base when he is on UN business, according to the authoritative US News and World Report.

Much of the initial information for Mr Powell's speech to the UN was provided by the Pentagon, where Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy defence secretary, set up a special unit, the Office of Special Plans, to counter the uncertainty of the CIA's intelligence on Iraq.

Mr Powell's team removed dozens of pages of alleged evidence about Iraq's banned weapons and ties to terrorists from a draft of his speech, US News and World Report says today. At one point, he became so angry at the lack of adequate sourcing to intelligence claims that he declared: "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit," according to the magazine.

Presented with a script for his speech, Mr Powell suspected that Washington hawks were "cherry picking", the US magazine Newsweek also reports today. Greg Theilmann, a recently retired state department intelligence analyst directly involved in assessing the Iraqi threat, says that inside the Bush administration "there is a lot of sorrow and anger at the way intelligence was misused".

Several months later, with Hussein’s government ousted and with the U.S. military coming up empty in its search for WMD caches, Bush began his historical revisionism by insisting publicly that he had no choice but to invade because Hussein supposedly had barred U.N. inspectors.

On July 14, 2003, Bush told reporters: “We gave him [Saddam Hussein] a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power.”

Facing no contradiction from the White House press corps, Bush continued repeating this lie again and again in varied forms.

On Jan. 27, 2004, for example, Bush said, “We went to the United Nations, of course, and got an overwhelming resolution – 1441 – unanimous resolution, that said to Saddam, you must disclose and destroy your weapons programs, which obviously meant the world felt he had such programs. He chose defiance. It was his choice to make, and he did not let us in.”

As the months and years went by, Bush’s lie and its unchallenged retelling took on the color of truth. At a March 21, 2006, news conference, Bush again blamed the war on Hussein’s defiance of U.N. demands for unfettered inspections.

“I was hoping to solve this [Iraq] problem diplomatically,” Bush said. “The world said, ‘Disarm, disclose or face serious consequences.’ … We worked to make sure that Saddam Hussein heard the message of the world. And when he chose to deny the inspectors, when he chose not to disclose, then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him. And we did.”

At a press conference on May 24, 2007, Bush offered a short-hand version of the made-up tale, even inviting the journalists to remember the invented history.

“As you might remember back then, we tried the diplomatic route: [U.N. Resolution] 1441 was a unanimous vote in the Security Council that said disclose, disarm or face serious consequences. So the choice was his [Hussein’s] to make. And he made a choice that has subsequently caused him to lose his life.”

In one of his White House exit interviews – on Dec. 1, 2008 – Bush again revived his convenient version of history, that Hussein was responsible for the invasion because he wouldn’t let the U.N. inspectors in. ABC News anchor Charles Gibson asked Bush, “If the [U.S.] intelligence had been right [and revealed no Iraq WMD], would there have been an Iraq War?”

Bush answered, “Yes, because Saddam Hussein was unwilling to let the inspectors go in to determine whether or not the U.N. resolutions were being upheld.”

In his frequent repetition of this claim, Bush never acknowledged the fact that Hussein did comply with Resolution 1441 by declaring accurately that he had disposed of his WMD stockpiles and by permitting U.N. inspectors to examine any site of their choosing.

Media Complicity

And never did mainstream reporters contradict Bush’s false history to his face. Indeed, some prominent Washington journalists even adopted Bush’s lie as their own. For instance, in a July 2004 interview, ABC’s veteran newsman Ted Koppel used it to explain why he – Koppel – thought the invasion of Iraq was justified.

“It did not make logical sense that Saddam Hussein, whose armies had been defeated once before by the United States and the Coalition, would be prepared to lose control over his country if all he had to do was say, ‘All right, U.N., come on in, check it out,” Koppel told Amy Goodman, host of “Democracy Now.”

In the real history, Hussein did tell the U.N. to “come on in, check it out.” But faux reality had become the trademark of the Bush presidency – and of its many supporters in the press corps.

Washington’s conventional wisdom eventually embraced another fake belief, that Hussein provoked the war by misleading people into believing that he still possessed WMD. The fact that Hussein and his government had declared they didn’t possess WMD was forgotten.

In line with the bogus version of history, “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley asked FBI interrogator George Piro, who had debriefed Hussein in prison, why the dictator kept pretending that he had WMD even as U.S. troops massed on Iraq’s borders, when a simple announcement that the WMD was gone would have prevented the war.

“For a man who drew America into two wars and countless military engagements, we never knew what Saddam Hussein was thinking,” Pelley said in introducing the segment on the interrogation of Hussein about his WMD stockpiles, which aired Jan. 27, 2008. “Why did he choose war with the United States?”

This “60 Minutes” segment never mentioned the fact that Hussein and his government did disclose that the WMD had been eliminated. Instead Pelley pressed Piro on the mystery of why Hussein supposedly was hiding that fact: “Why keep the secret? Why put your nation at risk, why put your own life at risk to maintain this charade?”

After Piro mentioned Hussein’s lingering fear of neighboring Iran, Pelley felt he was close to an answer to the mystery: “He believed that he couldn’t survive without the perception that he had weapons of mass destruction?”

But, still, Pelley puzzled over why Hussein’s continued in his miscalculation. Pelley asked: “As the U.S. marched toward war and we began massing troops on his border, why didn’t he stop it then? And say, ‘Look, I have no weapons of mass destruction,’ I mean, how could he have wanted his country to be invaded?”

Now, with the publication of Karl Rove’s memoir, the American public can expect a reprise of the argument that it was unfair for anyone to accuse President Bush of lying about Iraq, that he simply believed mistaken intelligence and did what he thought was best for America. In other words, Bush was the victim of mean critics, not a dishonest warmonger.

One also can expect that the mainstream U.S. news media will continue to forget its own role in perpetuating the lie that George W. Bush would never lie.

What's with all the Bush/Cheney/Wolfowitz/Hadley/Feith revisionism here? Is Patrick's new role as Keyboard Kommando Against Islamofascism inspiring the human trash to crawl back out of from under their rocks? Are wingnuts feeling guilty?

Right - we are "human trash" and "revisionists" to push back against ISIS/Leftist prop that America started the Iraq war based on lies to kill Muslims or steal oil or something.

You know, when you ape the same shit that ISIS believes, you may want to step away from the keyboard for a few.

From the factcheck.org link on yellowcake:

"The Senate report doesn't make clear why discovery of the forged documents changed the CIA's thinking. Logically, that discovery should have made little difference since the documents weren't the basis for the CIA's original belief that Saddam was seeking uranium. However, the Senate report did note that even within the CIA the comments and assessments were "inconsistent and at times contradictory" on the Niger story."

I know it's inconceivable that Tenet fell on the sword for his boss. Even if you want to believe that Bush believed that the yellowcake story was true, it's only 1 of many, many instance where intelligence was exaggerated, cherry picked, or outright made up to present a convincing case for War.

Even Tony Blair said this in a now unclassified doc.

“Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD,” the secret memo reads. “But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

The Iraq War being a lie and a dumb idea to remove a strongman does not make Islam the Religion of Peace.

I agree.

It's the same as how some Ukrainian rebels being old-school fascists does not make the Russian troops in Donbass "vacationing volunteers", and does not prove that the Ukrainians shot down a passenger airplane.

There are other political issues besides immigration. Can you think of more than one thing in a day?

Not for those trapped inside a metropolis that once felt like part of their fatherland/motherland. It's one of the main issues in Europe now and could be a precursor for the US. Carefully vetted (skills, compatibility) LEGAL immigration with preferences has always beaten illegal, unvetted immigration.

It's the same as how some Ukrainian rebels being old-school fascists does not make the Russian troops in Donbass "vacationing volunteers", and does not prove that the Ukrainians shot down a passenger airplane.

Yep.

Or how intervening in Libya by getting rid of Qaddafy leading to the rise of MB and Islamist Militias running the country is exactly the same shit Bush did in Iraq, just without a ground force.

The FBI says in the last 25 years 6% of terrorist attacks in the US have been by muslims. The have actually been more jewish terrorist attacks in the us than muslim. Go look up something called the START Global Terrorism Database, it's public.

I did. And it includes spiking redwood trees by the Earth Liberation Front as "Terror" or the breaking of a window by suspected Anarchists or even vandalism by the "Veterans for Non-Religious Memorials" (Coos Bay, OR) as Terrorism.

Like I said, there's what ordinary people consider Terrorism and whatever Definition the count-keepers are using. Most people do not consider Trees or Bulldozers or Windows to be the same as French Rock Fans or Window-on-the-World Waiters.

A bunch of smelly dirt worshipping hippies sabotaging a Bulldozer in some National Forest in Washington State is counted as one terrorist act, 9/11 is counted as one terrorist act. There's also a huge number of "Unknowns" counted as terror in the database (how do they know it's terrorism, then, and not crazy kids or ex-spouses or disgruntled employees with apolitical motivations?).

What's even more interesting is some bizarre ommisions. What's wrong with this list?

Hint: October 2002, almost 20 people killed and more injured, clear Islamic Motivation. Multiple attacks, which should qualify each one as a terrorist attack. Yet taken as a whole or individually, they not on this list...

I searched by date just in case:

Here's another question, if a bunch of North African hoodlums in France beat up an elderly man and take his wallet, calling him a dirty kuffar in the process, and their computers are chock full of "Algerian Cilantro, best Cilantro! Glory to Mohammed! French Women are Whores who need Arab Fertility!" are they terrorists or just criminals? If the former, than we are undercounting terrorism.

Hint: October 2002, almost 20 people killed and more injured, clear Islamic Motivation. Multiple attacks, which should qualify each one as a terrorist attack. Yet taken as a whole or individually, they not on this list...

Clear islamic motivation? You aren't serious. He was also motivated by the matrix. How exactly did you determine out of all the deranged rantings about motivation it was the islamic motivation that really counted?

Like I said, there's what ordinary people consider Terrorism and whatever Definition the count-keepers are using.

I don't consider spiking trees terrorism either. But I do consider racist, anti government, anti abortion, anti whatever religion, etc., etc. etc. attacks that kill people terrorism. By your count what was the score over the last 40 years or so? You and patrick and stratigist can hide in your basements pissing your pants all you want. I'm not very concerned. I'm a lot more likely to be killed by lightning than a terrorist who probably won't be islamic anyway.

Clear islamic motivation? You aren't serious. He was also motivated by the matrix. How exactly did you determine out of all the deranged rantings about motivation it was the islamic motivation that really counted?

He had multiple journal entries describing Jihad. Quotes from the Koran and the Hadith. Both were Muslim converts. Yep, Mohammed was borderline nutty, but many terrorists are dry drunks/mentally ill.

I don't consider spiking trees terrorism either. But I do consider racist, anti government, anti abortion, anti whatever religion, etc., etc. etc. attacks that kill people terrorism. By your count what was the score over the last 40 years or so? You and patrick and stratigist can hide in your basements pissing your pants all you want. I'm not very concerned. I'm a lot more likely to be killed by lightning than a terrorist who probably won't be islamic anyway.

I don't piss my pants over Islam and I consider Islamic terrorism in the West to be flies on a elephant's ass. My fear is Demographic pressure destroying Western Europe.

The ignorance in the West about the long legacy of Islamic Imperialism-Colonialism of Europe is Appalling. Everybody's heard of the Crusades, but few of the Battle of Tours or the Battle at the Gates of Vienna or the Enslavement of White Europeans by North African and Muslim Steppe Raiders that lasted from the Dark Ages to the 19th Century.

Islamic Colonialist-Imperialists controlled a more than quarter of Europe and ruthlessly oppressed the population for centuries, until well into the Enlightenment Era.